I have been experiencing occasional power brownouts/glitches in the computer room due to my new Toshiba AC unit kicking on and off, and because of that I discovered that the battery in my APC BE650G1 standby UPS had died. I cannot recall the last time I replaced the battery in it. The battery might be as old as 8 years when I originally bought the APC UPS. The battery is one of those typical sealed lead-acid types that need to be replaced every three to five years – no wonder it keeled over on me. Ouch!
Anyway, I ordered a replacement battery for the APC UPS, but I considered repurposing it for something other than my main PC, which is new, and a bit power hungry, with its 1000w 12-phase power supply, an i914000K processor and a RTX4090 graphics card. I looked about and then went ahead and bought a CyberPower GX1500. from BestBuy.
I really like this new unit, it’s a big upgrade from the APC BE650G1. That unit was good for about 390 watts max. The CyberPower GX1500U can handle up to 900 watts. This means it won’t kill its output power because of an overcurrent event if you’re in the middle of something hot and heavy (games, video editing, etc.) and the power goes out. At other times with an everyday power draw of about 165 watts, we have about 45 minutes of reserve. That’s plenty of time to shut things down in an orderly fashion. Even better, that kind of power reserve means you can run your internet modem for hours off it for hours on end during an extended outage – so you can access the internet via a wireless tablet or phone. Extra nice about this unit is that it is line interactive – meaning it can correct under-voltage (brown-out) or over voltage conditions without having to resort to kicking in the battery, which the old APC UPS needed to do. Even better, this unit is a true sine wave UPS, so it’s safer for sensitive electronics than older style simulated sine wave (stepped square wave) types of UPS. Happy – Happy!